SAVAK

After the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, when the United States and the United Kingdom removed Mohammad Mosaddeq, who was originally focused on nationalizing Iran's oil industry, but also set out to weaken the Shah from power on August 19, 1953. After the coup, the monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah, established an intelligence service with police powers. The Shah's goal was[9] to strengthen his regime by placing political opponents under surveillance and repressing dissident movements. According to Encyclopædia Iranica:

A U.S. Army colonel working for the CIA was sent to Persia in September 1953 to work with General Teymur Bakhtiar, who was appointed military governor of Tehran in December 1953 and immediately began to assemble the nucleus of a new intelligence organization. The U.S. Army colonel worked closely with Bakhtīār and his subordinates, commanding the new intelligence organization and training its members in basic intelligence techniques, such as surveillance and interrogation methods, the use of intelligence networks, and organizational security. This organization was the first modern, effective intelligence service to operate in Persia. Its main achievement occurred in September 1954, when it discovered and destroyed a large communist Tudeh Party network that had been established in the Persian armed forces[10][11]

In March 1955, the Army colonel was "replaced with a more permanent team of five career CIA officers, including specialists in covert operations, intelligence analysis, and counterintelligence, including Major General Herbert Norman Schwarzkopf who "trained virtually all of the first generation of SAVAK personnel." In 1956, this agency was reorganized and given the name Sazeman-e Ettela'at va Amniyat-e Keshvar (SAVAK).[11] These in turn were replaced by SAVAK's own instructors in 1965.[12][13]

SAVAK had the power to censor the media, screen applicants for government jobs, and "according to reliable Western source,[14] use all means necessary, including torture, to hunt down dissidents".[15] After 1963, the Shah expanded his security organizations, including SAVAK, which grew to over 5,300 full-time agents and a large but unknown number of part-time informers.[15]

In 1961 the Iranian authorities dismissed the agency's first director, General Teymur Bakhtiar[16] and he later became a political dissident. In 1970, SAVAK agents assassinated him, disguising the deed as an accident.

General Hassan Pakravan, director of SAVAK from 1961 to 1966,[16] had an almost benevolent reputation, for example dining on a weekly basis with Ayatollah Khomeini while Khomeini was under house arrest, and later intervened to prevent Khomeini's execution on the grounds that it would "anger the common people of Iran".[17] After the Iranian Revolution, however, Pakravan was among the first of the Shah's officials to be executed by the Khomeini regime.

Pakravan was replaced in 1966 by General Nematollah Nassiri, a close associate of the Shah, and the service was reorganized and became increasingly active in the face of rising Shia and communist militancy and political unrest.

A turning point in SAVAK's reputation for ruthless brutality was reportedly an attack on a gendarmerie post in the Caspian village of Siahkal by a small band of armed Marxists in February 1971, although it is also reported to have tortured to death a Shia cleric, Ayatollah Muhammad Reza Sa'idi, in 1970.[18][19] According to Iranian political historian Ervand Abrahamian, after this attack SAVAK interrogators were sent abroad for "scientific training to prevent unwanted deaths from 'brute force.' Brute force was supplemented with the bastinado; sleep deprivation; extensive solitary confinement; glaring searchlights; standing in one place for hours on end; nail extractions; snakes (favored for use with women); electrical shocks with cattle prods, often into the rectum; cigarette burns; sitting on hot grills; acid dripped into nostrils; near-drownings; mock executions; and an electric chair with a large metal mask to muffle screams while amplifying them for the victim. This latter contraption was dubbed the Apollo—an allusion to the American space capsules. Prisoners were also humiliated by being raped, urinated on, and forced to stand naked.[20] Despite the new 'scientific' methods, the torture of choice remained the traditional bastinado used to beat soles of the feet. The "primary goal" of those using the bastinados "was to locate arms caches, safe houses and accomplices ..."[21]

Abrahamian estimates that SAVAK (and other police and military) killed 368 guerrillas including the leadership of the major urban guerrilla organizations (Organization of Iranian People's Fedai Guerrillas, People's Mujahedin of Iran) such as Hamid Ashraf between 1971–1977 and executed up to 100 political prisoners between 1971 and 1979—the most violent era of the SAVAK's existence.[22]

One well known writer was arrested, tortured for months, and finally placed before television cameras to 'confess' that his works paid too much attention to social problems and not enough to the great achievements of the White Revolution. By the end of 1975, twenty-two prominent poets, novelist, professors, theater directors, and film makers were in jail for criticizing the regime. And many others had been physically attacked for refusing to cooperate with the authorities.[23]

The repression was softened thanks to publicity and scrutiny by "numerous international organizations and foreign newspapers." Jimmy Carter became President of the United States and he raised the issue of human rights in Iran. Overnight prison conditions changed. Inmates dubbed this the dawn of "jimmykrasy".[24]